I went to a Christian school when I was young, I was taught the Bible and some Christian ideology. It was during this time that I came to know and love the prophets, such as Abraham, peace be upon him. 
However, I became increasingly aware of the hypocricy of the church, which was rich and owned our school. They didn't seem to care much about the predicament of the poor in practical terms. Although they talked a lot about being generous they didn't practise what they preached.

When we went to church (once a week) all we did was sing some songs, read some of the New Testament (which was usually hard to understand) and listen to a brief sermon. The minister was always doing his best to make his sermons interesting, but I thought if he was telling the truth his message would sell itself.

The concept of a trinity puzzled me a bit and I never felt comfortable with it. The teachers would say "You can only be saved through Jesus". These seemed ridiculous to me, but when I asked what about people living in the jungle of Papua New Guinea who had never heard of Jesus, they became angry and wouldn't answer me. I got the same result when I asked about the people who lived before the time of Jesus. 

I became disillusioned and resented not having all the answers to the questions which my soul asked. 
I did believe in a God as an almighty creator but I was puzzled as to why he never left us a clear guideline of what he wanted/expected from us. 

I changed schools, but this was not enough. I became more and more unhappy. I began to hang out with a bad crowd dabbling with drugs and commiting nearly every crime imaginable. However, I never wanted to cross the line of no return (being outside of God's mercy), but with no clear guidelines I kept pushing those boundaries further and further. 

Eventually, I became wealthy from some of my illegal activities, I had fast cars, and women, and I was able to fulfill virtually all my desires.

But I began to realise that satisfying your desires does not guarantee you happiness, in fact it almost certaintly guarantees that you will be unhappy. I began to self-destruct, I began drinking heavily.I took my friends for granted and lost nearly all of them. I smashed my car and was unable to maintain my expensive lifestyle and my girlfriend left me. I then lost my licence for driving my motorcyle whilst being drunk. 

This was my lowest ebb, my parents were worried about me but did not know what to do. This was when I started to think about the meaning of life. I was 20 years old and I felt that I was not the sort of man I wanted to be. I decided that I had to figure out what sort of man I was going to be before I became 21. However, one year passed and I still did not know what I was supposed to do with myself. 
Anyway, I believed in God and knew that people had become so wicked that God would punish them, and the day of judgement couldn't be far off. When I saw on TV some homosexuals dying of AIDS my belief was reinforced. I looked at Buddhism, but on the first page that I looked at, I found that it condoned lying, so never looked at it again. I started to formulate my own religion - which was strongly influenced by the Old Testament or Judaism. 

Shortly after my 21st birthday I found myself on train, on my way home from some party, when I saw two Somali boys. I remembered that a friend of mine had told me about some Somalis that he had worked with - they were friendly, honest and generous. My friend seemed convinced that the reason for their apparent good behaviour was their religion - Islam. My friend had been given a Quran and confided with me that he believed that their religion was the true one. 

I decided to ask them what Islam was. They told me that they didn't drink, which made sense as alcohol was always getting me into trouble. Then they told the thing which convinced me that their religion was the truth - "We only pray to God. We don't ask Jesus or anyone else for help, we only ask God." That was it. How simple and obvious. How is it that I had never looked into this religion before. 

Previously, I had known nothing of Islam except what I had seen on the media. Of course, I admired their courage with all those "jihads", and liked their system of justice "death for murderers and adulterers". But I had never really looked into Islam before. But the more I looked into it the more I realised that Islam was what I had believed all along. 

Within a week I was at the mosque declaring that "there is no deity but God and Mohammed is the Messenger of God". 

Alhamdulillah 
Abdullah Williams

No Copyright:Any organisation or individual wishing to reprint or copy the contents of this website may do so as long as the information is kept in its original form, names of all authors and sources are kept intact and articles are used for non-malicious purposes. An acknowledgement to this site (daawah.com) would be appreciated.